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Monday, September 17, 2012

Leaf Rubbing Book: Exploring Types of Trees

A few blocks from our house is an amazing nature trail.
It’s lightly wooded and heavily trafficked by cyclists, families strolling, and
running enthusiasts. It’s one of the many things I love about our neighborhood.
We have made so many good memories there exploring.

Last weekend, we took a walk there as a family; before we
did I prepared a little leaf hunt for my oldest son. Download the PDF I made
here.

Print on standard paper, cut, staple, and attach to a small clipboard.Peel the paper from a few crayons and you’re set.

My son was careful to only collect leaves that were on the ground.

We wandered quite a ways down the trail looking for the specific shapes shown in the homemade book.

Is this leaf a maple or an oak?

Could that be a hickory or an ash?

This truly exercised my son’s observation skills. When he
noticed a leaf on the ground, he looked at the tree it fell from, and began to
notice differences in the bark and branches too.

Once the leaf he’d found was matched to the leaf shapes
in the book, we carefully placed the leaf behind its designated page, and
rubbed the side of the crayon over the paper to create a rubbing.

Now it was
time to return the leaf to nature.

He put an X through the leaf shapes on the book's cover as
he found them (note: some are featured twice).

That night when Grandma called, he asked her if she had a
Tulip tree (one of the leaves we failed to identify on our walk). Clearly, this
activity had made a lasting impression!

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The Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational blog was born out of one mom's desire to chronicle all the afterschool activities she is doing with her oldest son. Thanks to the Internet, when his sibling is school age and there's even LESS time to reinvent the wheel, she won't have to. (Aren't blogs wonderful?!?) Fortunately for you, she's sharing these ideas and activities with other parents who, like her, believe learning doesn't stop when the school day ends.